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Gaming Performance

As suspected, most gamers are going to find 8GB ample. Last time we talked about memory capacities many of you wanted to see the tests run with a large number of Chrome tabs open, suspecting that this would result in a different outcome.

Given how Windows handles/prioritizes system memory we didn't think this would have much impact on gaming performance. That said, this time we have run the game tests with Chrome open in the background with 65 active tabs fully loaded, which consumed 2.2GB of memory when 16GB was available.

With 16GB of memory available we found that Chrome plus GTA V used 9GB of memory but there was absolutely no difference between the 16GB and 8GB configurations. Moreover, just a single frame was dropped when moving down to 4GB of memory in a single-channel configuration.

Batman: Arkham Knight might not seem like a wise choice here but it's a memory hog, using almost 10GB of memory with Chrome running in the background. Despite this, the 16GB configuration was just 1fps faster than the 8GB config and 4fps faster than the 4GB config. To put it another way, 16GB was 4% faster than 4GB.

Of the now 20 plus games we actively benchmark with, the only other game to exceed 6GB of memory usage was F1 2015 and all three memory configurations delivered the exact same 109fps.